Applied Spoken Language Interaction in Distributed Environments (ASIDE 2005) ITRW and COST278 Final Workshop Aalborg, Denmark November 10-11, 2005

Graphemes as Basic Units for CrosslingualSpeech Recognition

Andrej Zgank (1), Zdravko Kacic (1), Frank Diehl (2), Jozef Juhar (3), Slavomir Lihan (3), Klara Vicsi (4), Gyorgy Szaszak (4)

(1) University of Maribor, Maribor, Slovenia
(2) Universitat Politecnicade Catalunya, Barcelona, Spain
(3) Technical University of Kosice, Kosice, Slovakia
(4) Budapest University of Technology and Economics, Budapest, Hungary

This paper presents our work on grapheme based crosslingual speech recognition carried out within the MASPER initiative. The performance of monolingual grapheme based acoustic models is compared to the performance of monolingual acoustic models based on phonemes. The transfer between source and target language was done using an expert knowledge approach. For the experiments, German, Spanish, Hungarian and Slovak served as source languages, wheras Slovenian was the target language. All experiments are based on SpeechDat databases. The results achieved by the use of grapheme based acoustic models are comparable to the ones achieved by phoneme based acoustic models.

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Bibliographic reference.  Zgank, Andrej / Kacic, Zdravko / Diehl, Frank / Juhar, Jozef / Lihan, Slavomir / Vicsi, Klara / Szaszak, Gyorgy (2005): "Graphemes as basic units for crosslingualspeech recognition", In ASIDE-2005, paper 24.